Restaurant success often depends on how quickly customers can be served with food items that a customer orders and on the quality of the food items when served. If the rate at which a restaurant prepares food items equals the rate at which those same food items are ordered and sold, a restaurant can theoretically have freshly-prepared food items ready to serve as customers order food items. Since it is not always possible to match food item production with customer ordering rates, and since certain fast food restaurant customers expect to receive their ordered food items quickly, many quick service food restaurants prepare various food items before customers order and keep food items ready for sale until a customer arrives and orders a prepared food item.
Holding systems to keep prepared food items ready for sale allow a cooked or ready-to-consume food item to be put into the system (e.g., an oven or a refrigerator) from one side and to be taken from the system on the opposite side thereby allowing food preparers to add food to the system and food servers to take food from the system.
Current holding systems come in various fixed sizes but the holding systems are not reconfigurable. Rather, such current holding systems are typically purchased “off the shelf” from a manufacturer/retailer or are custom designed to meet a specific user's specific needs. Regardless, current holding systems are “fixed” and thus not reconfigurable. Such fixed dimensional holding units limit food preparation layouts which may have to be modified or altered, for numerous reasons, relatively frequently. For example, as quick serve restaurants add or change menus items, food preparation layouts may need to be adjusted. Additionally, different configurations may be desirable to facilitate increased production of different menu items at different times, for example, different menu items and holding capabilities may be desirable at breakfast than at lunch or dinner. Fixed dimensional holding systems limit the degree to which the food preparation layouts may be reconfigured.
Moreover, after remodeling a kitchen, existing fixed holding systems may not be properly sized for the reconfigured kitchen. This may lead to the purchase of new food holding systems at considerable expense or to undesirable or inefficient food preparation layout.
Generally speaking, food holding systems in the restaurant industry should be easy to operate, for example, because of the high turnover of personnel, which often requires frequent training of new personnel.
Thus, it would be beneficial to provide a more flexible, reconfigurable, and easy to operate food holding system.